


A Tale Of Curiosity, Strange Meetings, And Some Feline Philosophy

by Selenic



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Warehouse 13
Genre: Crossover, First Meetings, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-24 18:13:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3778864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selenic/pseuds/Selenic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was an intruder in the Warehouse, and none of the alarms had gone off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Tale Of Curiosity, Strange Meetings, And Some Feline Philosophy

**Author's Note:**

> Some time ago I promised Tangotabby a fic as a bday present, but it took me a while to get an idea for it. I know ho much she loves Doctor Who, especially Eleven, and Warehouse 13, so I decided to bravely attempt a small crossover! Hope you enjoy it, TT! *hugs* This story is unbetad, so all mistakes are totally mine.
> 
> Crossposted [on LJ](http://selenic76.livejournal.com/70294.html)

 

A Tale Of Curiosity, Strange Meetings, And Some Feline Philosophy

 

"No. No. Not it. Ooh, that's interesting, but not it..."

The quiet mumbling had frozen Claudia in her tracks between the shelves, and now she was trying to pinpoint its source.

Just her luck that something like this should happen when she was alone in the Warehouse; well as alone as one ever was there. And granted, it was all her fault, what with promising Artie she could totally handle it, and that she wouldn't touch anything, which of course she had but that was beside the point. There was an intruder in the Warehouse, and none of the alarms had gone off. A man by the sound of it, and he was looking for something. Claudia began to cautiously sneak towards the sound, wishing Artie had trusted her enough to let her have a Tesla gun.

"A-ha! There you are! Wait, sorry, my mistake, you're not blue, it has to be blue..." Whoever the person was, they were unquestionably British instead of American, and obviously had a hard time being quiet. So they either didn't worry about being caught or were just plain stupid. But stupid didn't get you inside one of the most highly guarded locations in the world, and Claudia had to admit it really annoyed her that someone had managed to do so on her watch. Yet the man didn't exactly give an impression of being too smart either.

"Who even talks that much to themselves anyways," Claudia grumbled under her breath, "or inanimate objects. Mostly inanimate objects. Harmless looking, incredibly unpredictable, and potentially hazardous objects, that just happen to be very intriguing to a curious mind. They really can't expect me not do at least _some_ exploring." She was practically part of the team now after all, unlike this strange, rambling trespasser.

As Claudia approached she could hear stuff being moved around, and not too carefully—soft ruffling, loud bangs and clangs, something being dragged on a shelf—Artie would not be very happy. Perhaps the man was in a rush. Now that she was closer Claudia could also hear another sound, a humming or whirring of sorts, and definitely artificial in nature. The wavelength kept changing, almost as if they were being used to scan for something. The man still hadn't ceased chattering, his tone oddly cheerful for someone who had trouble locating whatever they were after.

"Wrong century, wrong shape, wrong species and what are you doing here anyway—" something suspiciously rat-like squeaked and scurried away, and Claudia barely managed to suppress a squeak of her own as it ran between her legs, but the intruded didn't seem to take notice. "—wrong everything, not even close, wrong smell. And you my friend were never crafted by the hands of someone who understood anything about multidimensional linguistics, or beauty." The last bit was delivered resentfully, and followed by a heavy sigh, and the whirring sound stopped. "Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way..." the man pondered, and started to mutter more quietly.

He appeared to be in the section that held the so far unclassified findings. According to Artie's explanation, any artifact without a proper name was there, waiting for them to gather enough data to give them a proper designation. Claudia secretly dreamed of getting to name a few of them, she'd even made a list of possible candidates. 

She was almost there now; the man was clearly in the next isle over. She stopped, and tried to find a big enough crack between the artifacts to take a peek. She found one, and so did he.

"Well hello there!" he said, a bright and without a doubt intelligent pair of eyes looking straight at Claudia. "Could you possibly help me out a bit, I'm looking for something." Too stunned to reply immediately, Claudia didn't have time to respond before the man had vanished from her view, only to appear on her side of the shelf a moment later. She turned around to find him standing next to her, scanning her with the sonic device. It had a glowing green light at the end of it, and when he checked the results the man seemed pleased. 

"You're human, excellent!" he noted with a wide grin, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. He didn't seem very dangerous, or evil, but that was no reason to not be wary of him. "I have to say this is quite a marvellous collection of items you have here." The man was quite a sight himself, with the somewhat gravity defying hair, tweed jacket, and bright red suspenders with a matching bowtie. There were many things Claudia could have said, but only one thing came to mind.

"Who are you and how did you get in here? You _have to_ tell me because it's going to drive me nuts if I don't' figure it out. Not to mention I'm going to have to be able to explain all of this to Artie, or he's going to blame me for the mess you've made and become even more insufferably grumpy than he already is, and trust me, no-one wants that."

"I am the Doctor, and I came in on the TARDIS of course," the man replied, and bowed slightly. "And who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?"

"I'm not telling my name to someone who won't tell me theirs," Claudia told him, putting her hands sternly on her hips. A nagging voice inside her heard kept insisting she should probably be running away by now, or calling the others on the Farnsworth, but her curiosity and professional pride kept overriding it. She simply must find out who this 'Doctor' was. 

"And what is a 'Tardis' anyway, is it that thing in your hands?" She snatched the aforementioned object from fingers too slow to grab it tighter, and began a cursory examination. "Is it like a teleportation device? Because if it is, your arrival should have triggered the dimensional activity sensors, or at least the atomic displacement warnings." The Warehouse security was tight, especially with all the things Claudia had added to Artie's already pretty ingenious system, so something as simple as a teleportation device should have registered on half a dozen sensor arrays. But it hadn't.

"Time and relative dimension in space, TARDIS for short, and she would be offended at you calling her anything as crude as a teleportation device," The Doctor said, frowning very briefly as if he was also slightly offended, and with a swift flick of a hand retrieved the stolen item.

"And no this is not her," he waived it about a bit, "this is a sonic screwdriver, built it myself, very handy." He smiled once again, smugly this time, placing his thumbs under his suspenders and rocking on his heels.

"Time and relative dimension in space..." Claudia mumbled, taking the words in and then for a spin through a complex series of thoughts. While she did, the Doctor took the liberty of resuming his scanning, moving on to some of the objects on the nearby shelf.

"A time machine?" Claudia just about squealed the question. "You have a freaking time machine? No, not just a time machine, more like a 'travel to any point of time and space in the universe' kind of machine—" Suddenly it hit her. "That's how you got in undetected! Because somehow this machine of yours enters you into the current timeline in a way that makes itself and you a part of that reality down to the smallest particle, like—"

"Like we'd always been there, brilliant deduction young lady!" the Doctor interrupted, genuinely pleased, but also from above Claudia. To her horror she noticed the man had clambered up the shelves to investigate the higher levels of it.

"Hey you can't keep doing that, Doctor Whatever Your Name Is," she said, and swivelled around just in time catch the seriously large and ominously dark vase that threatened to tip off a shelf. Good thing she had her gloves on, because she really didn't like the angry sizzle of them against the black surface, and would hate to think what would have happened had she not been wearing them.

"Now that's interesting, I've never been called that before," the Doctor said way too cheerfully as Claudia managed to push the vase back into its place. "Finally!" he exclaimed and jumped back down, holding in his hand a beautifully blue small glass sphere with a swirly glow inside.

"The Marble of Souls? That's what you were looking for?" It wasn't the artifact's official designation, since it didn't have one yet, but it had made Claudia's short list of neat things to name and she thought the description was apt. It had been reported that if you held it and gazed into it you began to see ghosts all around you, and hear them wailing gibberish. Usually that tended to drive people insane, except for this one remarkably sane lady who had lived with several cats. She'd claimed it allowed her to talk with them.

"No," the Doctor said, his brow momentarily wrinkled in puzzlement. "I was looking for the fabled and thought to be lost relic of the—" he let out a string of noises that you were more likely to hear coming from a cage full of vaguely cat-like creatures rather than a man, "—race, one of the more obscure and mysterious evolutionary branches of felines." He slipped the blue sphere into his pocket, and put away what he'd called the sonic screwdriver.

"Lovely people, secluded, but very amicable if rather overly fond of cuddling. But since the relic has a habit of disappearing and popping up in places where cats and quantum mechanics are excessively pondered on in conjunction, they aren't big fans of Earth, or humans for that matter, Schrödinger in particular. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a birthday to attend," he said, and walked past Claudia.

"Wait, are we talking about aliens now?" Claudia said once she'd processed all the information, and then quickly turned to follow the man "And you can't take that, it belongs in the Warehouse! It's dangerous!"

"It's only harmful to people who don't like cats," the Doctor replied, making a sharp turn and disappearing from sight. Claudia sprinted after him, determined to get the artifact back, only to turn a corner just in time to see the Doctor open the door of a big, blue, wooden thing. He stopped at the door before stepping in, and gave Claudia one last wide smile.

"I'll bring it back after the party, I promise. Just need to borrow it for when the cats sing Happy Birthday to her. And then later when she's asleep for the yearly philosophical discussion on matters such as the ratio of cuteness versus annoyance and how it affects your humans, very enlightening stuff." Then he stepped in and closed the door, but opened it a second later to peek out at the baffled Claudia.

"Oh and say hi to Artie, sorry I missed him this time around." And then he was gone again, and the whole blue box began to emit a weird, undulating sound, and to slowly fade out. Soon there was nothing left but the familiar rows of shelves, Claudia's even more perplexed thoughts, and the silence of not a single alarm announcing that anything out of the ordinary, at least on the Warehouse standards, had happened.

"You bet I will," Claudia huffed and crossed her arms across her chest. "I'm going to say hi from the Doctor, and then I'm going to go over the alarm system until I can figure out how to detect that machine of yours, and the next time..." she paused, an scheme already forming in her mind. "Next time, I'll be taking a look inside the blue box that travels through space and time."

Claudia smiled, with the kind of mischief and determination that even the Doctor should be a little frightened off, and headed home.

 

~~~ End ~~~

 


End file.
